Great article. For me you addressed the real issue in your last paragraph, "Likewise, IT vendors must make simplicity core to their design mission."

As vendors, we all need to embrace a new mindset of simplicity. The complexity of our IT environment is increasing by virute of being on the steep slope of an exponential grown curve. If we don't all setup and re-DESIGN IT for simplicity, we'll be buried in complexity.

The good news is that we are starting to see this new mindset in both the infrastructure (scale out vs. scale up) and IT management (IT Management as-a-service).

I agree wholeheartedly that IT vendors have generally failed to deliver solutions that are sufficiently simple to evaluate, acquire, deploy and manage. However, IT vendors will only sell what IT customers buy. So I encourage those buyers to vote with their wallets by being more diligent than ever about making simplicity a top criteria for their technology buys. Our commitment at CA Technologies is to deliver solutions that fulfill that criteria in a competitively differentiated way.

I think that vendors are as much to blame as the IT Organizations here. Large suites of tools seem to imply inherent simplicity, but let's be honest-- that's rarely the case. IT vendors purchase companies, and are then tasked with integrating dissimilar technology into another set of tools. Sure, it's difficult, but when that tool is bundled into a solution suite, it rapidly becomes yet another silo of information, with it's own servers, middleware, and databases.

So while yes, I believe that IT Orgs need to be the real source of the fix, most vendors aren't doing enough to actually provide simpler soltuions.

John Menkart over at CloudBolt wrote about some of the negative impacts of solutions suites, and the associated complexity that occurs when IT showhorns a needlessly complex (and incompliete) tool into their environment just because it "integrates" with other parts of the suite.

Frst and foremost, IT leadership needs to focus on tools that effectively solve their *actual* problems.

Break/fix for legacy apps is just one small part of the larger problem. My point was that even new management apps can add to the complexity burden if IT isn't selective about only acquiring solutions that are easy to evaluate, install and own.

I think the ball's in the IT leadership's court. It's not a problem that a company's senior management needs to fix. The IT organization itself must do the fixing -- and do the educating of senior management, if that's also required.

One problem is that management tends to be in denial when it comes to the functional capacity of IT staff. We've done such a good job of doing the unreasonable -- and avoiding out-and-out breakdowns -- that management doesn't fully prioritize reduction of workloads. When IT screws up, it is viewed as a technical failure on the part of the staff -- not as a result of toxic overloads foisted upon them by denial-based management.

Rob, you are so right -- getting sidetracked by all the little details can be disastrous, especially for those of us who tend to be perfectionists (you know who you are!) But depending on your work environment, overall operations can sometimes run themselves while we obsess over finer points. Maybe not so in IT, where things can go haywire very quickly.

I would imagine this metaphor holds for a range of professions, not just IT, though fewer work environments are more complex than IT ones. We get so busy putting out fires and performing other mundane, often repetitive tasks that we take our eye off the big picture. I like the ring of "simplication as strategy" -- the first step is to recognize the problem and commit to making changes.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.